We are delighted to announce an exhibition by Craigie Horsfield in our Lugano venue, where we will show a selection of works from the 1970’s until today, including the monumental photograph “Hungarians” made in Poland 1973.
The British artist is known for the extraordinary black and white photographs of large dimensions and great intensity and for the film “El Hierro Conversation” shown at Documenta 11 and the Whitney Biennial 2004 in New York. Since 2003 he is making color photographs and printing them with the new technique called dry print: modified ink-jet prints, in this case printed on Arches paper.

The images made by Craigie Horsfield are always the result of a special relationship between the author and the people or places photographed, where the iconography and history of art are present as a condition of the gaze rather than as a quotation. In Horsfield’s works there is a stillness made of infinite and imperceptible movements and restrained gestures. There is a long and concentrated time, a time capsule that contains it all. There's the waiting. Horsfield captures his subjects and their presence in time, their history as it is inscribed in their traits, but without a narrative, with an absolute rigor in layout and composition. There is the structure of almost monumental historical painting, but also the suspension of an infinite present: in this Horsfield is classical and contemporary at the same time. It is as if his portraits - realized with zenithal light and neutral background - of real every day people, caught the icon, the matrix: it is the transition from the real to the imaginary, from the particular to the universal. The captions that refer names, places and dates are part of the narrative, of the experience that marks the transition. The identity and the uniqueness of the individual in history are rendered in the image when the subject is in relation with himself and the others. For this reason the unique print of his photographs is not just a technical specification, but a meaningful thought: it reflects the uniqueness and also the inevitability of the experience.

Born in Cambridge, UK in 1949, Craigie Horsfield studied at St. Martin’s School in London from 1967 to 1971. He was among the first young artists to change over to photography, sensing the potential of representation not only of reality, but also of emotions. In keeping with his Socialist convictions, he lived in Cracow, Poland, from 1972 to 1979. During this period he created photographs that underlined the role of the individual in the history and culture of a place; the present was perceived as a moment that lasts in time, that contains both past and future. After his return to London in 1980, Horsfield started to print these photographs in large size. The historic exhibition “Another Objectivity” (Paris, 1989) that also included Jeff Wall, Thomas Struth, Robert Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher, gave him the first recognition and was followed by many exhibitions around the world.
Since the 1990’s Horsfield has worked mostly on large social projects about certain cities or places, among the others: Barcelona: la Ciutat de la Gent (1993 – 95), The Rotterdam Conversation (1997 – 98) and the most recent Madrid Conversation (2006 - 07) and Napoli Conversation (2008).
In the last years Craigie Horsfield’s works have been exhibited in a travelling retrospective at the Museum Jeu de Paume in Paris and the Foundation Gulbenkian in Lisbon; in 2012 he had an important solo show at Kunsthalle Basel where he presented his recent photographs in the form of monumental tapestries; in the same year he participated in the Biennale of Sydney and exhibited in group shows at MoMA in San Francisco, the National Gallery in London and the Art Museum of Lugano.